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Please follow the tribe etiquette and rules below while participating in social activities.

All participants of this community must adhere to the global Snapzu community rules and etiquette below in order to keep this tribe orderly, respectful, and friendly. Breaking any of these rules may result in a ban from this tribe, or the suspension of your account as a whole.

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A campaign group advocating the break-up of Facebook has subverted the social network's advertising tools to tempt its employees into leaking information. Freedom from Facebook says it targeted ads at the technology company's staff, promoting a "safe space" website where they can anonymously submit "whistleblower tips".

If you own an Amazon Echo — or if you're planning to buy one as a holiday gift — you should know a bit about what sorts of private information it stores about you, and how to delete that info. After all, the topic of Alexa and whether it's always listening may come up during the holiday. A judge recently ordered Amazon to hand over Alexa voice recordings in a murder case, for example, which may lead some people to believe the Echo can always hear what you're saying.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of 57 newly granted patents for Apple Inc. today. In this particular report we cover Apple's use of liquid metal in the integral housing of the iPhone fusing metal with glass. Apple was also granted five design patents today with one of them being for the original 2017. We wrap up this week's granted patent report with our traditional listing of the remaining granted patents that were issued to Apple today.

Apple is reportedly cutting production orders for its newest iPhones, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal that cites sources that claim that demand for the new devices — especially the iPhone XR — has been weaker than expected.

Verily, Alphabet's life sciences arm, has paused work on its so-called "smart lens" program, which was aiming to put tiny sensors on contact lenses to measure blood sugar levels in tears. If it worked, the lenses could help diabetics track their glucose levels in real time and in less invasive ways than the traditional meters that require piercing the skin. But in a blog post on Friday, Verily said that after four years of research it has determined that detecting blood sugar in tears is a massive — and potentially insurmountable — technical and scientific undertaking.

Volkswagen is scheming an all-out industry assault in order to become the next leader on the electric forefront. On Friday, the automaker said that it would invest $50 billion (44 billion euros) in order to develop electric cars and other new technologies.

Battery life is a difficult thing to contextualize, and fraught with issues in testing. How do you use your phone? How can you compare it to other phones in a meaningful way? There’s a lot of questions to tackle, but to figure out which smartphone has the best battery life, they’re questions we’re forced to answer. You can read more about this in our how we test page. For those unwilling to click, it’s as simple as:

Researchers have that found that 3D printers spew tiny particles into the air as they operate, though the quantity and nature of these potentially toxic aerosols are poorly understood. A new study identifies a startling variety of these emissions, and the conditions under which they’re produced.

As if stand-alone technologies weren’t advancing fast enough, we’re in age where we must study the intersection points of these technologies. How is what’s happening in robotics influenced by what’s happening in 3D printing? What could be made possible by applying the latest advances in quantum computing to nanotechnology?

Ford CEO Sherif Marakby has posted a detailed overview of the automaker's self-driving strategy, perhaps in an effort to show that the company will push through with its plans under his leadership. Marakby, who took over as CEO in July 2018, talks about how Ford is tackling each of the elements needed to launch a self-driving service by 2021, as well as its recents partnerships.

As expected, the AirPort devices are beginning to become unavailable from Apple as it is no longer updating the product line. The AirPort Express has been off the menu for quite a while now, but the 2TB AirPort Time Capsule, and AirPort Extreme models are now officially no longer sold by Apple. Users looking to pick up any of the AirPort products will need to look at third-party retailers or used on eBay.

SpaceX today received US approval to deploy 7,518 broadband satellites, in addition to the 4,425 satellites that were approved eight months ago. The Federal Communications Commission voted to let SpaceX launch 4,425 low-Earth orbit satellites in March of this year. SpaceX separately sought approval for 7,518 satellites operating even closer to the ground, saying that these will boost capacity and reduce latency in heavily populated areas. That amounts to 11,943 satellites in total for SpaceX's Starlink broadband service.

Big tech is getting in on blockchain in a big way. Microsoft has launched a cloud-based blockchain development kit powered by Azure. “This kit extends the capabilities of our blockchain developer templates and Azure Blockchain Workbench, which incorporates Azure services for key management, off-chain identity and data, monitoring, and messaging APIs into a reference architecture that can be used to rapidly build blockchain-based applications,” Microsoft blockchain engineering lead Marc Mercuri said.

Last year Sharp released the Aquos R Compact, a phone with a tiny camera notch on the top edge and a humongous bezel on the bottom for a fingerprint sensor. It didn’t look great. But for this year’s model, the company has hit upon a novel solution to increase the screen size while keeping the fingerprint sensor. Yep, that’s right, the Aquos R2 Compact has another notch.